The Oxford History of the French Revolution

by William Doyle

  Deputies on all sides certainly hoped so, and there was now much talk of getting down to business and constructing a constitution. Everybody, even third-estate deputies, had been unnerved by the scale and vigour of the popular ferment unleashed over the preceding fortnight. Responsible men now looked forward to a period of dignified calm, allowing a return to normality and social harmony. Yet as July began there was little sign of that. On 30 June a crowd of 4,000 stormed a prison on the left bank where ten mutinous French Guards were awaiting transfer to closer confinement. They released them, carried them back in triumph to the Palais Royal, and fêted them with a public collection. Such incidents suggested that the ferment was far from over. Despite the euphoric scenes of 27 June, suspicion of the Court’s motives was still widespread and profound. What was more, it was justified. On 26 June four regiments were ordered from the frontiers to the Paris region, and around the same time the king asked the veteran Marshal de Broglie to assume supreme command. On 1 July more troops were ordered up, making a fivefold increase, to well over 20,000, in less than a week. Nobody could fail to notice the build-up, or the number of foreign regiments involved, presumed to be more reliable than French ones. On 8 July Mirabeau moved a motion in the Assembly that the king be petitioned to withdraw the soldiers, and nobody spoke against it. The king’s bland reply was that their presence was necessary to preserve public order. It seems clear, however, that their true purpose was what everyone suspected: to intimidate Paris and reverse concessions made since mid-June. At Court, the queen and Artois remained determined to get rid of Necker. Persuading him to stay on 23 June had been a temporary necessity in their eyes, but they continued to try to exclude him from all important decisions while they cast about for more pliable replacements. By 11 July they thought they had found them. That afternoon, the minister was presented with a royal letter dismissing him and ordering him to leave the country immediately. He complied at once, shocked though he was. Three other ministers fell the next day; Broglie became minister of war and Breteuil, an old rival of Calonne and a known authoritarian, was made chief of the Council. Precisely what the new ministry intended to do is not clear. For once the news of Necker’s fall broke, it scarcely had time to do anything.

  The changes could hardly have been more ill timed. Everybody was frightened and unnerved by two weeks of troop movements. As 12 July was a Sunday, nobody was at work. Above all, the food shortages and high prices which had been foreseeable since the previous summer were reaching their peak, the dangerous midsummer weeks between the exhaustion of old stocks and the harvesting of new. Necker, of course, stood for control of the grain trade and subsidized bread prices. Over the spring he had fought a losing battle to keep Paris cheaply supplied, but one consequence was to drain other markets, and May was marked by bread riots all over Flanders, Artois, Picardy, and Normandy. News of them did much to persuade conscience-stricken clergy to break ranks and join the third in June, so that some action might be taken. But by the time the orders merged, disturbances were occurring much closer to the capital, and early in July news arrived that at Lyons riots against high prices had culminated in the destruction of the city’s ring of toll-gates. Between 4 and 7 July the Assembly debated the grain trade, although inconclusively, since most deputies believed it ought to be free but given the popular mood were reluctant to say so. And meanwhile bread prices in Paris crept up towards their highest level in twenty years.

  News of Necker’s dismissal reached the Palais Royal in the afternoon of the twelfth. Everyone sensed that a decisive trial of strength had begun. At once crowds flocked to the theatres and forced them to close as a sign of mourning. Later in the day groups milling in the Tuileries gardens were set upon by German cavalry who had been ordered to clear the area. It looked like the beginning of the long-dreaded military action; and although, after some uncertain skirmishing, the troops withdrew at nightfall, the whole city was by then frantically trying to arm itself. And once armed, the populace did not hesitate to act. That night, following the example from Lyons, they attacked the toll-gates around the city and broke down sections of the customs wall. The night sky was lit up by fires which destroyed most of the gatehouses. The next morning they turned their attention to places where arms were thought to be stored, starting with the abbey of Saint-Lazare. Blackest popular suspicions were confirmed when substantial stocks of grain were also found there, and the monastery was looted amid ominous scenes of sacrilege and anti-clericalism. Men of property were now seriously alarmed. The preceding Saturday the electors of Paris, who had continued to meet unofficially after their electoral duties had been discharged late in May, had already agreed to set up a citizens’ militia to maintain order when troops could not be trusted. Now they hurried to activate their decision, and by the evening of the thirteenth patrols were out. But the action came too late to prevent what happened next.

  On the morning of the fourteenth crowds marched to the Invalides, the military veterans’ hospital, where cannon were found as well as small arms. They were dragged across the city to the place de Grève, in front of the Hôtel de Ville. From there it was only a short distance to the most formidable of all arsenals, the towering state prison of the Bastille. Here was the next obvious place to search, but it did not seem possible to storm such a fortress, and nobody knew until afterwards how poorly manned and defended it was. So first the electors tried to negotiate a handover. But when impatient crowds forced an entry to the inner courtyard the garrison panicked and opened fire, killing almost a hundred. Now rival military expertise intervened. Discipline in the French Guards regiment had never recovered after the mutinies and desertions of the last week in June. New defections, followed by bibulous celebrations in the Palais Royal, were reported daily. But experience had not gone the way of discipline, and dissident French Guards now appeared before the Bastille with the cannon brought from the Invalides. The drawbridge and gates could not have withstood them at point-blank range, and the governor knew it. The Bastille surrendered.

  During all this time the Assembly was sitting at Versailles, and as the news from the capital filtered in they issued ever more anguished appeals to the king to pull back the troops. He countered initially that in the circumstances the troops were more necessary than ever. But then, on the afternoon of the fifteenth, he came to the Assembly in person to declare that he was ordering the army encamped around Paris to disperse. The delirious deputies cheered him, threw their hats in the air, and escorted him in a body back to the palace, where the tearful scenes of 27 June were re-enacted. There was much talk of his natural goodness and concern for the well-being of his peoples. But it was not that which had produced such a spectacular change of policy. Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth the army had indeed been poised to restore order in Paris, and there were enough troops to do it, even if the carnage would have been fearful. But the example of the French Guards was disquieting. Might other regiments follow their example? Morale was certainly under pressure from forced marches, poor quarters, and constant appeals by anxious civilians not to act against defenceless patriots. Commanders were increasingly reluctant to put their men’s discipline to the test, and Broglie was too experienced an officer to take risks in such circumstances. He advised the king that he could no longer rely on his army.

  Louis XVI’s acceptance of that advice marked the end of royal authority. The monarch recognized that he no longer had the power to enforce his will. He was therefore compelled finally to accept all that had been done since mid-June. The Estates-General had gone. They had been replaced by a single National Assembly with no distinction of orders, claiming sovereignty in the name of the nation, and a mission to endow France with a constitution. For four tense weeks the queen, Artois, and their coterie had plotted and schemed to reverse these achievements. Ultimately they were foiled by a wave of popular support for the stand taken by the third estate and fellow-travellers in the other two orders, an atmosphere so intoxicating that the very forces the Court was calling up to
contain it were infected. The storming of the Bastille marked the climax of the movement. Challenged by it, Louis XVI drew back, leaving the people of Paris convinced that they alone had saved the National Assembly from destruction. Henceforth they would see themselves as guardians of the liberty won that day. This was no ordinary revolt, as the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt is reputed, perhaps apocryphally, to have told Louis XVI. Apocryphal or not, it was still true. This was a Revolution.

  5

  The Principles of 1789 and the Reform of France

  Royal authority had evaporated. Nobody could misread the signs of that in the days following Louis XVI’s decision to pull back his troops. Early on 17 July the Count d’Artois left Versailles for the north-east frontier, to be followed over subsequent weeks by many of the courtiers who had supported his intrigues. Their emigration clearly showed that for the moment they thought the royal cause lost. And later the same day the king made his way, escorted only by a handful of deputies, to the Hôtel de Ville of Paris to confirm that the troops were withdrawing and announce that Necker had been recalled. He also confirmed the nomination of Bailly as mayor of Paris (a new title) and Lafayette as commander of the new citizens’ militia, now being called the National Guard. It was said that 150,000 armed citizens were on the streets that day, all wearing cockades in red and blue, the colours both of the city and of the Duke d’Orléans. Later in the month Lafayette would splice them with Bourbon white for the uniform of his National Guardsmen, and so the patriotic tricolour was born. The king accepted a cockade and stuck it in his hat on arrival at the Hôtel de Ville; and then, for the first time, people began to cheer him. Just along the road, a contractor was already setting his workmen to demolish the Bastille.

  But the excitement and tension of that week did not evaporate so easily. The price of bread remained high, supplies uncertain, and rumours of starvation plots were readily believed. Violence against those suspected of opposing the patriotic cause was all too tempting a response for a populace that on the fourteenth had hacked the governor of the Bastille to pieces and massacred the city’s chief magistrate, Flesselles, who had delayed the issue of arms. Their heads were paraded through the streets on pikes. On the twenty-second Bertier de Sauvigny, intendant of Paris, was caught trying to emigrate and brought back to the city. He and his father-in-law Foulon, who had briefly accepted office in Breteuil’s ill-fated ‘ministry of the hundred hours’ on 12 July, were lynched and decapitated under suspicion of trying to starve the city the previous week. A few public men, carried away by the excitement, attempted to justify these killings. Barnave, in a phrase that was to dog the rest of his career, asked what was so pure about the blood shed. But most educated onlookers were appalled by such scenes of unbridled savagery. Lafayette, feeling that the newly established National Guard should have prevented them, tried to resign his command, but was pressed from all sides to stay on. Feeble though it was, the citizens’ militia was the only public force patriots trusted, and it needed to be reliably led and organized in these formative days. News now pouring in from the provinces only reinforced this conviction.

  Arthur Young, who had left Paris on 28 June convinced that the Revolution was over, was told in Nancy on 15 July that provincial towns would not stir until they knew what Paris had done. But in other places the established authorities had already been challenged for failing to deal with bread shortages. The militia set up in Marseilles in March was soon imitated in other southern towns, and in the last days of June, as the constitutional struggle at Versailles hung in the balance, many municipal authorities came under increasing pressure from electors or self-appointed notables for failing to take precautionary steps against the dual threat of popular violence and despotism’s revenge. News of Necker’s dismissal made the movement general, and in most of the kingdom’s major towns the third week of July saw the establishment of revolutionary committees which either supplanted the old authorities or worked alongside them, monitoring their every move. Usually they assumed power amid scenes of riot. In Strasbourg the town hall was sacked. In Rouen grain stores were pillaged and textile workers smashed spinning-jennies. In Rennes soldiers refused to defend the citadel and joined crowds who drove their commander out of the city. Everywhere there were calls for cheaper bread, and in some places people denounced all taxes. The self-appointed committees of this municipal revolution made it their first priority to contain the effervescence, and citizens’ militias were hurriedly set up everywhere. Subsequently they busied themselves with securing grain supplies, and not least with sending congratulatory addresses to the National Assembly on its providential escape from destruction. Prominent in these movements were the lawyers who had played such a central part in the spring elections; but all property owners were drawn together by the fear of anarchy, and in commercial and industrial centres businessmen threw themselves into political activity where they had earlier been mere tongue-tied onlookers. Nobles and clergy often proffered assistance too, but they were regarded as too close to the municipalities now being supplanted, and in any case the earlier intransigence of the noble and clerical deputies at Versailles threw suspicion on all those who had elected them. In Dijon nobles and clergy were put under precautionary house arrest. Nor was exclusion from local power the only blow the privileged orders were to suffer in these weeks. Even more serious was an attack on their authority in the countryside.

  Rural unrest had been growing in many parts of the kingdom as the grain shortage worsened over the spring. Only the limitless hopes raised by the drafting of the cahiers and subsequent elections had held an anxious and hungry peasantry back from wholesale attacks on grain stores and defiance of the demands made by tax-, tithe-, and due-collectors. They clearly expected a spectacular lightening of their burdens. During the rumour-filled weeks of deadlock at Versailles the number of incidents increased, and tales of riots and tumults in Paris and other cities fanned rural impatience. News of the king’s surrender to popular resistance broke all restraints. His acquiescence in the defeat of the privileged orders was taken as a signal to all his subjects to take their own measures against public enemies. The prolonged political crisis had spawned countless wild rumours of plots to thwart the patriotic cause by starving the people. Monastic and noble granaries, reputedly bulging with the proceeds of the previous season’s rents, dues, and tithes, seemed obvious evidence of their owners’ wicked intentions. Equally suspicious were urban merchants scouring country markets far beyond their usual circuits to provide bread for hungry townsmen. Besides, the roads were thronged with unprecedented numbers of men seeking work as a result of the slump. Farmers had good reason to dread the depredations of bands of travelling vagrants, and now took little persuading that the kingdom was alive with brigands in aristocratic pay. It was just a year since the notorious storms of July 1788, and as a promising harvest began to ripen country people were particularly nervous. All this produced the ‘Great Fear’, a massive panic that swept whole provinces in the last weeks of July and left only the most peripheral regions untouched. Peasants assembled, armed themselves, and prepared to fight off the ruthless hirelings of aristocracy. Seen from a distance, such armed bands were often taken for brigands themselves, and so the panic spread.

  In many areas villagers did not wait for the marauders to arrive. Then it would be too late. They were determined to make sure of aristocratic defeat by striking pre-emptively. After all, they would only be anticipating what the Assembly was bound to decree. As one country priest explained, ‘When the inhabitants heard that everything was going to be different they began to refuse to pay both tithes and dues, considering themselves so permitted, they said, by the new law to come.’1 In other places they raided barns to repossess what had already been paid, and in certain regions, such as western Normandy, Burgundy, Hainault, Alsace, Franche Comté, and Dauphiné, there were mass attacks on manor houses and castles. Even so there was little indiscriminate destruction or looting, except where lords offered resistance. The attackers
made for the symbols of feudalism—dovecotes, seigneurial ovens and wine-presses, weather-vanes. Above all they made for muniment rooms, where terriers and other records of feudal obligations were held. The rooms were ransacked, their contents burned, and distantly glimpsed smoke palls from bonfires of legal papers made their own contributions to the general panic. When lords were in residence, they were often compelled to make formal renunciations of their rights. If they refused, or if their records were not found, whole buildings might be burned down. On 19 July intruders at the manor house of a particularly unpopular Franche Comté landlord at Quincey, near Vesoul, were blown up in a huge explosion which destroyed the building. Nobody blamed the intruders—it was assumed that this was the revenge any lord would take given the chance. News of the incident soon spread over all eastern France, constantly embroidered, and led to a new wave of sacking castles and rich abbeys which went on well into August.

  Townsmen were appalled. Urban upheavals taking place simultaneously had done much to inflame the peasantry, but they were over fairly quickly, and citizens’ militias seemed to have the situation in most towns under reasonable control. In some places they even felt safe enough to send their forces out into the surrounding countryside to restore order. But as yet they had little training or experience, nobody trusted regular troops, and remoter rural districts seemed completely out of control. From Paris and Versailles, with reports of riot, pillage, and arson pouring in from all points of the compass, the situation looked even worse. ‘By letters from every province’, declared the spokesman of the National Assembly’s reports committee on 3 August,2 ‘it appears that properties of whatever sort are falling prey to the most disgraceful brigandage; on all sides castles are being burned, monasteries destroyed, farms given up to pillage. Taxes, payments to lords, all are destroyed; the law is powerless, magistrates without authority, and justice is a mere phantom sought from the courts in vain.’ He moved a motion urging citizens to keep calm, and continue paying their taxes, tithes, and dues until the Assembly decreed a new order of things. But more radical members thought such an appeal unlikely to work without more tangible incentives. Deputies from Brittany, whose regular meetings to concert a common approach were winning them notice as the ‘Breton Club’, decided that a more spectacular act, ‘a kind of magic’ as one of them termed it, was required if public effervescence was to be calmed. The whole of feudalism, they thought, should be abolished in one grand gesture. It was going to happen anyway: cahiers, which another committee of the Assembly was now busily analysing, had demanded it. They persuaded the Duke d’Aiguillon, a rich young courtier of liberal views who had been active in the Committee of Thirty, to propose abolition as an amendment to the original motion. They timed his intervention for the evening of Tuesday 4 August when they expected a thin attendance in the chamber, but when the radical Breton Le Chapelier would be in the chair. It proved to be the most sweeping and radical legislative session of the whole French Revolution.